Victoria Ou and Justin Huang, both 17, attend College Park High School in The Woodlands, Texas. In May 2024, they walked into the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles and walked out with $50,000. They built the device themselves, in their own homes.
The problem they set out to solve has been building for decades. Microplastics particles smaller than five millimeters, often invisible to the naked eye have made their way into oceans, drinking water, food supplies, and human blood.
Current filtration methods use physical filters, chemicals, and biological solutions, and they come with real drawbacks: inefficiency, expense, and potential harm to the surrounding environment. Ou and Huang went in a different direction entirely.
Their device fits in your hand, roughly the size of a pen. Inside, a tube and two ultrasound transducer stations generate an acoustic pressure field that holds microplastic particles in place while water flows past them and out the other side.
The physics behind it (known as acoustic force) pushes particles toward pressure nodes within the tube based on their density and compressibility.
Plastic behaves differently under sound than water does, and that difference is exactly what the system exploits. No chemicals enter the water. The process adds nothing and removes only what shouldn’t be there.
In a single-stage setup, the device filtered between 84% and 94% of polyethylene microplastics across flow rates of 10, 20, and 40 milliliters per minute. A two-stage configuration pushed that figure to 94–96%. Comparable results came with polyurethane and polystyrene, both exceeding 95% filtration efficiency.
Those numbers came from a homemade lab, not a university research facility.
Victoria and Justin have been in school together since elementary school. The same sixth-grade science teacher, Ms. Caldwell, put the environment on both of their radars. Victoria’s first science fair project, back then, was on plastic pollution, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch specifically.
The thread from that childhood project to a $50,000 prize at an international competition runs in a straight line.
The win itself was significant. The Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations recognizes work that makes an enduring difference for future generations through rigorous scientific inquiry.
Nearly 2,000 students from 9th through 12th grade competed, with more than $9 million awarded across the fair. Ou and Huang also took home a separate $5,000 Earth and Environmental Sciences prize.
Their next target is the laundry machine. Synthetic textiles account for roughly 35% of primary microplastic pollution every wash cycle sheds fibers that flow back into the water supply.
A device integrated into a washing machine’s outflow would address the contamination at the source rather than chasing it downstream.
Huang has said the current prototype filters too little volume to be deployed at scale, and the next phase of work involves understanding the phenomenon well enough to build something larger something suited to water treatment plants, industrial textile facilities, and municipal systems.
Justin has said that skills he picked up as far back as fifth grade, building LED lights with his grandfather, directly translated to constructing the system.
Huang has said that with more professional equipment and access to a proper laboratory, the device could be refined toward large-scale manufacturing. Two teenagers working from their houses achieved 94% filtration efficiency. The ceiling on what this becomes with serious resources behind it remains to be tested.
Just waiting for the U.S. to get their priorities in order.
These articles have been short and to the point past few weeks. I’ve been writing and editing a book about dopamine regulation and the importance of social media and the power it gives back to the people.
I feel this work is urgent, so I’ve been putting all my spare time into it.
Should be available May/June.
Stay tuned! Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:
Your Neighbor,
Benji Faun
SOURCES:
1. FOX 26 Houston — The Woodlands students win $50,000 for microplastics filtration system (May 29, 2024)
2. Grist — A different kind of youth activist: Meet the high schoolers who invented a microplastics solution (June 7, 2024)
3. AsAmNews — 17 year olds win $50K for invention to filter plastics from ocean (July 29, 2024)
4. Free the Ocean / GreaterGood — Texas Teens Turn Sound Waves Into a Weapon Against Microplastics (September 2, 2025)
5. SunnySkyz — Texas Teenagers Win Prestigious Award For Inventing Device That Filters Microplastics From Water
6. Society for Science (referenced across multiple sources as the primary governing body for ISEF and the Gordon E. Moore Award) — societyforscience.org
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.